There is much more to driving performance (not even counting the setup element) than perfecting specific (athletic) skills. Actually, in my experience, the smallest contributing factor to exceptional performance is physical skill.
Working on physical skills may optimize the way the driver provides inputs to “control” the kart, BUT those physical inputs are triggered by something… it’s gray, and squishy, and not the least bit athletic.
Driving is a process, whether it’s ‘thought about’ or is simply ‘done to win’. The objective of the process is to make reality match your optimal mental plan (or mental model) for getting around the track faster than everyone else.
You plan is constructed from the information you have amassed about driving in general, the specific track, your kart, the tires, atmospheric conditions, your competitors, etc. etc. I call this your knowledge matrix. It includes all sensations you should be experiencing at any particular point around the track, and all of the pre-programmed driving input triggers (aka your muscle memory for driving around the track).
So, with a plan constructed from your knowledge matrix, the driving process goes something like this:
-
A continuous torrent of sensory information flows in.
-
You identify and extract the relevant sensory information for your current location/condition/objectives.
-
You translate those ‘raw’ sensations/feelings into the driving information you need (e.g. speed, level of grip, rate of rotation.)
-
You interpret what the translated information means by comparing it to your mental model to determine if you are on target, are at the limit, need to make an adjustment (to your driving and/or your mental model, etc.)
-
You execute the (muscle memory) driving inputs called for by the plan if any.
-
You continuously repeat the process until the end of the session.
Therefore, ultimately everything comes back to your knowledge matrix instead of physical skills or athleticism. The more breadth and depth you have to your knowledge matrix the better driver (and setup person) you will be. This is true regardless of whether you ‘thought’ about things to improve your matrix or you just ‘did’ things to improve your matrix (like driving to win).
However, if you build the majority of your knowledge matrix through ‘action’ then most of your learning comes with a context attached (rote learning), so you need A LOT of ‘seat time’ to build a robust matrix. Conversely, if you spend some time thinking about, researching, evaluating, asking ‘what ifs’ and visualizing the information in your matrix, you will expand the interconnectedness of all of your knowledge/experience, and that can do nothing but improve your driving performance.
Getting back to the driving process; when it comes to actually being in ‘the seat’ it’s important to understand that when driving, the brain can function in a continuum, if you will, ranging from ‘serial’ mode (intellectual, ‘focused attention’, ‘thinking’) to ‘parallel’ mode (‘intuitive’, ‘aware’, ‘feeling’).
If you spend most of your time driving in serial mode, then you will be slow because the brain cannot process a lot of sensory information quickly in serial mode (this is the realm of the novice).
If you spend most of your time in parallel mode, then you may be fast (because you are driving by pattern matching ‘batches’ of sensory information at a time, which is fast/efficient), but you may also make unforced errors, or you may not be able to ‘access’ the information you need to understand what the chassis is doing (you’re just driving, not understanding anything).
Most really fast/good drivers hit a sweet spot where most of the driving process just happens on auto-pilot (parallel mode), while ‘they’ sit back and observe/catalog what everything means with a dash of serial processing (rubber’s building up in T2, I think I’ll try pulling the rears in a few mm, that guy has a weakness exiting T5, etc.).